The massive metal double doors open and I’m hit with a whoosh of warm air. Inside the hatchery, enormous racks are stacked floor to ceiling with brown eggs. The racks shake every few seconds, jostling the eggs to simulate the conditions created by a hen hovering atop a nest. I can hear the distant sound of chirping, and Bruce Stewart-Brown, Perdue’s vice president for food safety, leads me down a hall to another room. Here, the sound is deafening. Racks are roiling with thousands of adorable yellow chicks looking stunned amid the cracked ruins of their shells. Workers drop the babies into plastic pallets that go onto conveyor belts, where they are inspected for signs of deformity or sickness. The few culls are euthanized, and the birds left in each pallet are plopped on something like a flat colander and gently shaken, forcing their remaining shell debris to fall into a bin below. Now clean and fluffy, the chicks are ready to be stacked into trucks for delivery to nearby farms, where they’ll be raised into America’s favorite meat.
Not long ago, this whole protein assembly line might have been derailed if each egg hadn’t been treated with gentamicin, an antibiotic the World Health Organization lists as “essential” to any health care system, crucial for treating serious human infections like pneumonia, neonatal meningitis, and gangrene. But the eggs at Perdue’s Delmarva chicken production farms have never been touched by the drug.
That’s extremely uncommon in corporate factory farming. Currently, livestock operations burn through about 70 percent of the “medically important” antibiotics used in the nation—the ones people need when an infection strikes. Microbes that have evolved to withstand antibiotics now sicken 2 million Americans each year and kill 23,000 others—more than homicide. Even though public health authorities from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have long pointed to the meat industry’s reliance on antibiotics as a major culprit in human resistance to the drugs, the FDA has never reined in their use.
Microbes that have evolved to withstand antibiotics now sicken 2 million Americans each year and kill 23,000 others.
I’m in Delmarva, the peninsula composed of pieces of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, because it is Big Chicken country—the teeming barns that dot its rural roads churn out nearly 11 million birds per week, almost 7 percent of the nation’s poultry. And Perdue, the peninsula’s dominant chicken company and the country’s fourth-largest poultry producer, has set out to show that the meat can be profitably mass-produced without drugs. In 2014, the company eliminated gentamicin from all its hatcheries, the latest stage of a quiet effort started back in 2002 to cut the routine use of antibiotics from nearly its entire production process. (Read about the disturbing new report by OxFam on contract chicken farming here.)
In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered a mold-based compound dubbed penicillin that could kill common microbes that cause dangerous infections. But even as they began to revolutionize medicine, antibiotics had a fundamental flaw. While collecting the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine, Fleming warned that it’s “not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them.”
When an antibiotic attacks a colony of bacteria, the great bulk of the bacteria dies or can no longer reproduce, and the infection is cured. But a few rogue microbes can withstand the assault and pass their hardy genes on to their progeny. If you unleash the same antibiotic on the same bacteria over a long enough time, you’ll create a bacterial strain that can thumb its nose at the drug. And it isn’t just turbocharged Darwinism that makes our antibiotics so vulnerable. Through a process called “conjugation,” genes—including ones that have become resistant to particular antibiotics—can bounce from one microbe to another.
From the top: Freshly delivered eggs at a Perdue hatchery in Maryland; recently hatched chickens at the same facility; and chicks growing up at a contract farm in Delaware.
Though we’ve known this for more than 70 years, doctors have too often treated antibiotics as a sturdy crutch, not a delicate tool to be used sparingly. The CDC estimates up to half of all antibiotics used in US medicine are improperly prescribed, speeding up resistance. But that is nothing compared with how recklessly they’ve been used in factory farms. When you treat thousands of chickens in a huge enclosed barn with, say, steady doses of tetracycline, you risk generating an E. coli bug that can resist the antibiotic you threw at it, and that bug’s new superpowers can also jump to a strain of salmonella that happens to be hanging around. Now, two nasty pathogens that plague humans have developed tetracycline-resistant strains.